Today is a queit day for chasing for me. Mainly because I have to work. There are a great deal of people that would like to do what we do as storm spotters. The reality of it is we drive a great many miles to get to the target area (area where we believe storms will fire) and the storms may or may not fire in that target area. If one thing changes in the atmosphere then "poof" nothing happens. When people find out that it is not like the Discovery Channel's "Storm Chasers" where every episode (or every chase) has a tornado they often ask me, "Then why would you drive so far (sometimes 800 to a 1,000 miles) in a day and spend the hundreds of dollars on fuel, food, and equipment to not see any tornados, and when you do see a tornado you put your life on the line to film it and obtain data from it". My answer is simple: my love for the chase out weighs the times I don't see anything, the ability to possibly see a tornado, film it, record what information I can, and report on that information to possibly save lives or develope better more effective early warning systems to save lives greatly and I mean greatly out weighs the miles driven, the money I expend, or the possibility of injury or death to do so. I would do it everyday if I were able to.
We all, as storm spotters, love what we do and we don't do it for fame and glory (if you try to do it for fame and glory you will probably end up...lets just say it probably would not be smart to do so), we do it because what we do has meaning and purpose. If one bit of information just one storm spotter obtains saves one life then we have succeeded.
And that is why we do what we do.